Flash Fiction Friday - The Girl at the Machine

He could
see her from the train. She was on the platform, standing at the ticket machine.
A glove was hanging from her lips. Her teeth were holding firm to the glove’s
index finger. She needed her naked hand for the job, what with the touch-screen
and all. The tip of her nose, and a small radiant patch around it, glowed red
from the cold. Beautiful? Indubitably. Impossibly.

Her soft grey
coat was cut to her figure and it hung almost all the way down to her shiny
black boots. A Victoria’s Secret bag hung from her wrist. As she entered the
train it was her eyes, more than all the rest, that caught his attention. They
were still alive.

He started
to think about her in a way he’d told himself (many times!) he wasn’t
supposed to be thinking. He wondered if she might also have thoughts sometimes that she wasn't supposed to be thinking.

Maybe she was
kept up in the middle of the night by dreams. Dark, heavy dreams that crouched
on her cranium and rapped on her skull. “Don’t sleep,” they probably say,
“don’t run away. I have something to show you.” And do they ever. They have to
show her what becomes of little girls who follow their dreams. He could see it in her eyes when they locked with his.

She'd
always been like this. She came into the world with her eyes wide open. They
had to wash the blood out of them before she could see. That’s what people
always said about her. “She’s got her eyes open.”

He watched
her little foot, in her little boot, fidgeting on the subway floor and thought
about how lonely his life had become. So
what, he concluded, lots of people
are lonely. When he looked back up at her eyes he thought, Maybe she’s lonely too.

He was hot.
He was born hot. He was always hot. Hot under the collar, in his shoes and his
shorts. His strain of DNA in the species Homo sapiens had never quite adapted
from its African roots to the whole “clothes” thing. He’d prefer to have the
fur back. He’d made the mistake of putting on a couple of extra layers this
morning. People in the news were always panicking about cold weather and the
paranoia had seeped into both his outerwear and underwear. Now he was standing
in an overheated subway car with a hundred other overdressed,
overstuffed,
overdone New Yorkers. He was hot. And she was obviously cold. He raised his
puffy red hand to his own face before deciding hers would be a better fit for
it. Hers had a slight trickle of a tear on it. Another gift from the cold.

She was
like ice. Every cell in his body contracted on contact with hers.

She did
something that astonished him: she did nothing. Even worse than nothing, she
stared at him with unwavering intensity, like she could read his most intimate
thoughts through his big hot hand. He took his hand away. He was cool now.

“Thank you,”
he said.

She stared
at him and said nothing.

“I was a
little overheated,” he said. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not allowed to touch you.”

“Little late for that,” she
said.

“Yes,” he
answered and considered his situation for a moment before asking, "Is there anything I can offer you in reparation?”

"No.”

“There’s
nothing you want?”

She looked
at him for a long time without saying anything. There were a lot of things she
wanted, none of which she could see coming from him. “You should probably just
quit while you’re ahead.”

He was a
little too excited for his own good. “I don’t’ want to quit. I think I’m
getting close to a breakthrough here.”

“The word
you’re looking for is breakdown.”

"It's a painstaking process."

"You're telling me."

He nodded. “It’s
fine line for me, really. I suspect it is with you, too.”

“I’m sure
you do. You probably suspect all kinds of things. You’re a pretty suspicious
character aren’t you?”

“Not,” he
said and stopped. “No, not really.”

Her
expression was an eloquent answer: You could’ve fooled me.

He gathered
the forces of his counterattack and lined them up for assault just as the train
pulled into the 23rd Street station.

“This is my
stop,” she said before he could launch.

“Oh, mine,
too,” he said. It was obvious to her that this was not his stop.